Sure, that’s when I got around to the whole “married with children” thing, but that’s not what I’m talking about. A decade ago I made a commitment to come back not only to the same vacation spot year after year, but also to the same exact condo.

In my carefree youth, I never would have dreamed of tying myself to a timeshare. I was sleeping around the world in hotels, motels, hostels, resorts, long houses, tree houses, convents, yurts and once (due to lack of planning on my part), the back of my Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.

But I’ve become increasingly less flexible with age. It’s gotten to the point where if I don’t have just the right kind of pillow, it ruins my whole vacation.

Luckily, I now have my bedding (and any other lodging) needs met by a lovely concierge who calls two weeks before our visit to our “vacation home.” I was never a timeshare kind of gal, but I have to admit: I’ve converted.

There is a certain comfort in having someone know you. It doesn’t ring false when the desk clerk who has babysat our kids for years says, “Welcome home” upon our arrival. In “our” unit (it’s 1/20th ours, anyway), there is a kitchen stocked with everything — including a cheese grater. Every year we see the same friendly faces in the hot tub during après ski.

And while timeshare ownership is about comfort and convenience, it’s also about really connecting with a certain stretch of Colorado.

Our designated week at Beaver Creek is in early April, and we trade in some of our “points” (granted according to the time slot and property you own) for a long weekend in Aspen every September. Although the calendar is the same every year, each time we go we see a different mountain.

One lucky spring at the Beav, we got nearly a foot of powder every night during our stay. More often we see the first flowers of spring and a friendly porcupine lumbering around the Grouse Mountain lift after a long winter.

In Aspen, we’ve had everything from green foliage to golden glory to bare branches. My photos of Maroon Bells remind me of the Claude Monet series of haystacks; painted under a variety of conditions, each perspective is beautiful in its own way.

But I do still have wanderlust, and now that my children are older (they just got their first passports — I’m so proud), I can start showing them the bigger world. Partial ownership of a vacation property is transferrable. With intervalworld.com, for example, you can trade your condo in the Colorado mountains for time at one of the 2,800 properties they represent in 75 countries.

That’s not to say that trading time from one condo to another is as simple as swapping your PB&J for a ham sandwich in the first-grade lunchroom. It requires a matrix of schedules, points calculations and (in my case) an engineer spouse to broker the trade. Even with all that, in an effort match up our week at Beaver Creek with our daughters’ spring break, we ended up with the four of us booked in a single-room studio.

We’ll have to spend some more time learning the timeshare system — because I don’t think even two of us will fit in the back of my Ghia.

Chryss Cada is a freelance writer and an adjunct professor at Colorado State University. Visit her online at chryss.com.

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